Stanley Park

by Timothy Taylor

  They were staring across the embers at each other. For reasons Jeremy could not yet explain, this answer was suddenly what he had expected all along. And he saw himself as a fool for having asked, for having thought that silence could be fruitfully ended between them. “That’s it?” he said.

  The Professor raised his eyebrows and shrugged.

  “That’s all I get after slogging through the forest to talk to you? Coming here in the middle of the evening?” Jeremy gestured angrily at the duck carcass, still hanging on the roasting stick, which toppled on cue into the fire pit.

  The Professor responded calmly. “Did you want more advice or just different advice?”

  The silence bristled.

  “Why not talk to Jules about it?” the Professor asked.

  “It’s complicated,” Jeremy said, but this reminder swamped his anger with different feelings. There would be problems here, he knew. And Jules was a little bit like the Professor in her commitment to the things she believed. “Me going broke wouldn’t be doing her any favours either,” he said finally, shaking his head.

  “Even so,” the Professor continued, “you would have held onto the one thing that provides you with stability and roots.”

  At which point Jeremy had to lie back in the ferns and laugh out loud. “Roots? Listen to you.”

  “All right, all right, keep it down,” said the Professor. “I realize my present work puts at risk my credibility on the matter of stability, but if you just understood how important—”

  Jeremy sat up straight. “Are you the voice crying in the wilderness?” he said. “I mean the voice.” Then he lay back and let himself laugh some more. His father now allowed a small smile.

  “You know, quiet is normally a good policy around here,” the Professor said. “The attention one attracts is not always good attention.”

  Tell me about it, thought Jeremy.

  BECOMING BLOOD

  What kind of attention was he attracting anyway? This question of Who They Were consumed Jeremy. As a preoccupation these days, it could be ranked only behind his father’s mental state and the frantic contemplation of his own financial picture. It was an important question, Jeremy had long ago decided, because in the world of food you could be a Crip or a Blood, but you had to choose sides.

  One of the American students came up with these names at the culinary institute in Dijon and they stuck. Crips versus Bloods. Crip cooks were critical. They fused, they strove for innovation, they were post-national. They called themselves artists. They tended to stack things like mahi mahi and grilled eggplant in wobbly towers glued together with wasabi mayonnaise, and were frequently suspicious of butter. Vegetarianism was an option for Crips but not for Bloods. Blood cooks were respectful of tradition, nostalgic even. Canonical, interested in the veracity of things culinary, linked to “local” by the inheritance or adoption of a culture, linked to a particular manner and place of being. Blood cooks liked sweetbreads and pot-au-feu. Bloods ate tacos, bratwurst, borscht. They used lard and as much foie gras as they could get their hands on. They made cassoulet to the recipe left by Louis Cazals and, depending on where the Bloods called home, they might like kimchi, salmon planked on cedar, fish stew with sausage, or twice-cooked duck.

  Chef Jeremy Papier was Blood. He learned this truth about himself in his first working kitchen, although he didn’t understand what he had learned until after he left France.

  The kitchen was the Relais St. Seine l’Abbaye in rural Burgundy, where Jeremy worked for a year after graduating from the institute. The restaurant was named for a town, which was named for an abbey, which was named for the source of the Seine River flowing from a nearby ridge down to Paris. The designation “relais” meant you were either a filling station or a roadside restaurant, the latter in this case, a low building with multipaned windows, set back behind a gravel courtyard with ivied walls. Here the customers—very often German and Swiss families following the Seine to Paris—would park their Saabs and Audis and Benzes.

  The relais was small, sixty-five seats around square tables with plain white cloths. To the rear of the restaurant the windows opened onto a grassy hillside climbing up to the edge of the Fôret de Gens, which ran down into the Ignon Valley. The forest was still full of boar and elk, many small etchings of which Chef Quartey had collected over the years and hung on the walls of his restaurant.

  Chef Jacques Quartey himself was large—six foot six, close to 250 pounds—and appropriately fond of Great Danes. Two of his dogs would be wandering around the dining room at any given time, and Jeremy understood Quartey’s total pack to include seven. They had been warned at school to expect initial disdain from any chef, particularly those who had been Michelin-starred and, even more so, those who had descended from four generations of similarly decorated culinary master sergeants. Still, it made an impression when Chef Quartey pinched Jeremy’s letter of introduction into a long wick and used it to light the burners of the big range.

  He said only: “Are you fast enough? Sometimes we are busy.”

  Jeremy knew he wouldn’t be fast enough, no matter what accolades he had garnered at school. So he said: “I will be.” Cagey, relying on the language barrier to obscure his meaning.

  Chef Quartey handed Jeremy off to a somewhat more sympathetic sous-chef named Claude, who still wouldn’t let him anywhere near the line. Claude, a five-foot-nothing pylon of culinary rigour, had Jeremy prep mise en place—all the ingredients and portioned materials required by the line cooks, which they would then arrange around themselves at their respective stations—for the first three weeks. The greatest portion of this daily prep routine seemed, to Jeremy, to involve leeks. Leek gratin, deep-fried shredded leeks, bistro leek salad—all these were relais standards. Of course, there were also shallots to mince, parsley to wash, sort, stem and chiffonade. Peppercorns to crush, chives to chop. Wine and brandy to decant into pour bottles. Bushels of tomatoes to roast and dice, celery roots to peel and shred or cube or cut paper-thin for crisps, depending on what Quartey bellowed out at his lecture each morning. Make mirepoix by the bucket. Fill the salt dishes. Wipe down the stations. Wipe down the stations again.

  Week three climaxed with Jeremy participating in the making of a relais-style chicken stock that Claude described as sincère. Jeremy was never sure what this descriptor meant, except that his was a stock apparently based on no false pretences and that Claude had cruised repeatedly by, hovering at his elbow as Jeremy roasted the bones, sweated the mirepoix, then combined these with water, bay leaves and a halved head of garlic, and brought it all to a lazy bubble.

  Week four, Thursday, Claude was absent for the dinner service because of a funeral. He made it clear the day before, having cleaned down his station, that the deceased was one of only three people for whose funeral he would miss work. (He did not name the surviving two.) Jeremy found himself promoted dizzily to the line. An appetizer and a main fell solely to him.

  Quartey addressed the squab main course first: crapaudine. It was an old-fashioned presentation where the small bird was opened and flattened, legs tucked in to make a tight package. When it was roasted and garnished with bits of hardboiled egg for eyes, it did look faintly like a toad, the crapaud from which the name derived. Quartey described the plating in his typically efficient style. “Red pepper coulis to the plate. Our little toad here, please. Potato frite, like so.” He showed Jeremy how to fan the frite starburst-style around the roasted bird, interspersed with roasted shallots and garlic cloves. Garnish with leaves of frissée. He gave similarly detailed instructions on the appetizer, sautéed langoustine served with curried cream. The positioning of the shredded leeks would be precisely the same, Chef Quartey emphasized, on each plate.

  He would prep for the next two hours. Mirepoix first and foremost, always. Caramelized for the langoustine, which themselves had to be poached, shelled and diced. Green onions julienned, red peppers diced to a tiny diamond for garnish. Chicken stock reduced, flavoured with curry, mace and th
yme, thickened with velouté, cream added. Prep for the squab meant roasting the shallots, the garlic and the peppers, which then had to be skinned and blended with water and more garlic into a coulis.

  He looked up. Chef Quartey was watching him. “Messy,” he said. And Jeremy saw that his station was littered with bits of julienned green onion.

  Forty minutes before service, falling a little into the weeds, Jeremy opened up twelve squabs, flattened them with the heel of his hand on the board and tucked in the legs. He ran them onto a skewer, par-roasted them. At the pick-up, the breast would be crisped under the broiler and plated according to the chef’s demands. At the call for shellfish, the langoustine and the caramelized mirepoix would be combined, sautéed and seasoned, piled in the centre of the plate, surrounded by a puddle of curried cream, garnished with the deep-fried leeks and red pepper diamonds, and slid into the window for pick up.

  Maître d’hôtel Duclos reported later that a German family had applauded as he slid the plated squab onto the white linen tablecloth. The clapping made a sharp noise in the quiet dining room.

  Chef Quartey said: “It is good Claude has only two friends left.” But he smiled. Jeremy distinctly saw him smile.

  Week five, Monday, Chef Quartey took Jeremy and three of the Great Danes into the covered market in Dijon early in the morning to pick out meat, cheese and produce. He asked Jeremy’s opinion on something, a signal compliment.

  “Name your favourite,” Chef Quartey said, waving a hand over the seventy or eighty cheeses on display under the counter. They were standing behind the display case with the owner, who also addressed Quartey as ‘Chef.’

  “J’aime beaucoup le Reblochon, Chef,” said Jeremy, naming a cheese from the Haute Savoie near the Swiss border.

  “Excellent. I love Burgundy, but one cannot be fanatical about these things.”

  Sunday of week seven, on the one day the restaurant was supposed to be closed, Jeremy walked from the little hillside house he was renting down into St. Seine l’Abbaye to buy cigarettes at the gas station. “Gitanes, s’il vous plaît.”

  He walked through town, enjoying the almost entirely random way that streets began and ended. There were intersections of three streets, corners impossibly tight. He made his way over to the abbey. Inside, it was cold and gloomy, the altar feebly lit. He approached tentatively and stood, offering silence. Turning, his view was dominated by a twenty-foot-high crucifix, which hung on the wall above the abbey’s main door. Staring into the nave from the back of the church, this Christ had an unusual companion: A skull and crossbones, like the pirate emblem, hung on the wall beneath his feet.

  The dead. The dying. A family winnowed to two. But from what?

  Papier. Jeremy let the name unscroll in his head—staring unblinking at the crucifix, at the skull—a name whose history lay in its own grave. His grandfather’s first name had been Felix; Jeremy knew that much. Felix, who emigrated from Poland sometime in the 1920s, alone. Who had chosen a new surname on arrival. A truncated, Anglicized Hebrew surname, no less, although no Jewish lineage was ever subsequently acknowledged. For the few years the Professor remembered Felix on the scene, the Papiers had been Lutherans. After the disappearance, the divorce, the telegram relating news of his death, the story went with him.

  “But we might be Jewish,” a twelve-year-old Jeremy protested to his father. There had been a youthful period of genealogical interest, during which time Jeremy turned up evidence of Polish families with names like Papierbuch and Papierczyk. Papierovitch and Papierin. Jews all. Jeremy had been hopeful.

  “Indeed. We might be. We might have this history. We are, for starters, both circumcized.”

  The Professor never spoke down to children.

  “But that we cannot know our history for certain would be your grandfather’s point, I imagine. He chose a surname. He chose this name with an intent, by a method, that is lost to us. You might think of it as the punchline to a joke Felix can no longer explain.”

  A hard concept to understand, then. The appeal of a given history—with the set of answers and instructions that Jeremy presumed came with such a legacy—had been so clear. Appealing still.

  Outside the church in St. Seine l’Abbaye, Jeremy crossed the narrow highway that ran through the town, walking along the shoulder a short distance, smoking and inhaling deeply, squinting into the wistful, rose light of sunset. Contemplating personal history had made him lonely, only the second time since arriving in France. The first had been just before school began. He had gone to Lyon by train, again questing back through time. Seeking without any plan beyond wanting to find the building where his mother and father had met, where her extended family had lived. He didn’t expect to find relatives; he understood they had long drifted away into the newly traversable landscapes of the European Union. But the idea of the building had appealed to him as an iconic place, a site he might identify with his own beginnings.

  A site of important kitchens too, Jeremy understood. The kitchen of the large restaurant where his mother’s father and uncles had worked as busboys and dishwashers. The kitchen at home in which they had eaten and in which his mother and father had had their first conversations. Jeremy carried a composite mental picture of it based on his parents’ separate, scattered recollections. A cold tile floor. A wooden table big enough for the entire clan, where the Professor had done his interviewing—copious notes on sheaves of yellow paper, Jeremy imagined.

  The young man was interested in the vardo, Hélène’s father had explained to her. How some of them still lived, yes, although he also seemed interested in how they liked living in an apartment after having known the vardo.

  Hélène told her father to tell the young man with his paper and pencils that she liked their apartment very much, and that she had been far too young to remember her short life in the wagons. But when she cooked dinner that night, it had been a stew of lamb marinated in yogurt and lemon juice. An old recipe, an open tribute. Tart and unexpected. The flavours contradicting themselves by being at once deep and light. Difficult to pin down. The Professor ate, watched her. Hélène looked away.

  Handsome and beautiful, Jeremy imagined. His father described a small woman, with a precise figure, smooth dark skin, a large mouth and shining volumes of mahogany-coloured hair. His mother remembered a young man of strikingly intelligent eyes, angularity, likeable oddness. Jeremy wondered if perhaps she had also liked the young man’s permanently erased history.

  They married in a civil ceremony. Her father’s suggestion. The once-traveller now proud to wear his black city suit in front of the Justice, proud to wish them well, his daughter and her new husband. To bless their trip across the sea to Canada. To bless their remaining days with a touch of his thumb to each of their foreheads, a kiss on the lips. It was a serious but unsentimental goodbye at the Gare Part-Dieu.

  As it happened, Jeremy never found either building. He had an address torn from the corner of an envelope found in his mother’s desk drawer. Even so, no luck. The streets seemed to have changed. At a grocery store that looked to date from the same time, Jeremy stumbled over his words, asking about an apartment building that might have been across the street. A large restaurant that might have been nearby.

  The man thought he remembered a restaurant. He didn’t think it was a very good one.

  “Pas Bocuse,” he said, chortling.

  He felt lonely then, riding the train back to Dijon. And now, school finished, work begun—in a very different part of the country, a place for his own new beginnings—Jeremy drew deeply on his cigarette and felt lonely a second time. He thought about climbing out of the valley and up onto the ridge above St. Seine l’Abbaye. From there he might have a view of the whole town. But setting out in that direction, he passed the relais and stopped instead.

  To his surprise, there were lights in the window and cars parked in the gravel lot. To his further surprise, there were no gleaming salon cars. He counted instead a couple of dented Renault Cinq, a Citro�
�n 2CV and several flat-bed trucks like those the local farmers used.

  He went inside, and there Jeremy found that the dining room was noisily full. There was a scumble of country French conversation with no pause for his arrival. Nobody noticed him as he entered the room, except Patrice, their waitress from Pellerey, who was out front alone that evening. She came out of the kitchen with a chicken carved in the bourgeois style—cut up and reassembled for presentation on the table with a bunch of watercress sprouting from the cavity.

  Patrice flashed him a crooked-toothed smile and gestured back towards the kitchen. When he went in, he found Claude sprinkling hard-boiled egg on a butter-lettuce salad and Chef Quartey plating a portion of langue de boeuf à la moutarde. Jeremy wordlessly pulled on his whites and his apron, washed his hands and, following Chef Quartey’s nod, went over to help on grill. Much later, after everybody had gone and the broken tail lights of the farm trucks had disappeared up and over the hill, they all sat together out front for a snack and a nightcap. He returned Patrice’s encouraging smile from earlier. He smiled at her Roman nose, brown eyes and black hair, and she smiled back. Chef Quartey poured them all more wine.

  “Santé,” he said, and tore off a piece of bread to dip into his own glass. “On the seventh day, Ger-ah-mee,” Chef Quartey continued, pausing with something like respect and waving a paw around the empty room, “we serve the people with the rubber boots.”

  The words stayed with Jeremy as he walked home with Patrice, his arm around her shoulder, hers along his waist. The Rubber-Boot People, the people from here. Their simple words.

  He woke up with the very earliest light, his hand on the strong curve of her hip. The light broke into the valley, through his window, across Patrice’s brown shoulder, and there was, for a moment, utter simplicity and coherence.

  He cooked seven nights a week from that point onward, eager for the seventh day when the stiff cardboard menu was put aside in favour of a chalkboard where Chef Quartey or Claude, or even Jeremy eventually, would write down their ideas. And during his few morning off-hours, Patrice began to show him the secrets of the surrounding countryside. In the Fôret de Gens above town, there were hollow trees in which the women of the village had once hidden pots of soup for resistance fighters. They never saw the men, Patrice told him, but they would return in the still-dark morning to retrieve their cold tureens.